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Table of Contents Dora Bobory BEING A CHOSEN ONE: SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELF-FASHIONING IN THE WORKS OF GEROLAMO CARDANO M.A. Thesis in Medieval Studies CEU eTD Collection Central European University Budapest June 2002 Being a Chosen One: Self-Consciousness and Self-Fashioning in the Works of Gerolamo Cardano by Dora Bobory (Hungary) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU ____________________________________________ Chair, Examination Committee ____________________________________________ External Examiner ____________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor CEU eTD Collection ____________________________________________ Examiner Budapest June 2002 I, the undersigned, Dora Bobory, candidate for the M.A. degree in Medieval Studies declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person’s or institution’s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. Budapest, 1 June 2002 __________________________ Signature CEU eTD Collection Table of Contents List of Illustrations i Introduction 1 I. The Sources of Renaissance Self-Consciousness 8 I. 1. Centrality of Man in the Hermetic Texts 8 I. 2. Melancholy, Genius, Divination 10 I. 2. 1. The Ancient Greek Tradition of Melancholy 11 I. 2. 2. The Middle Ages and a Different Attitude to the Same Question 18 I. 2. 3. Melancholy of Renaissance; Renaissance of Melancholy 21 I. 2. 4. Gerolamo Cardano: A Case Study of a Chosen One? 25 II. Image of the Self in the Autobiography 26 III. Self-Fashioning through the Scientific Works 44 III. 1. Introduction 44 III. 2. Signs of Being a Chosen One in the Scientific Corpus 46 III. 2. 1. Miracula and Mirabilia in the Encyclopedic Works 46 III. 2. 2. Cardano’s Melancholy 47 III. 2. 3. Divination and Self-Fashioning 49 III. 2. 4. Dreams and Demons 52 III. 3. Conclusion 56 Conclusion 59 Bibliography 70 CEU eTD Collection List of illustrations Figure 1. Engraving of Albrecht Dürer, “Melencolia I” 21 Figure 2. Portrait of Gerolamo Cardano from the year 1557 (source unknown) 33 Figure 3. Emblema of Joannes Sambucus dedicated to Cardano 62 CEU eTD Collection i Introduction In contrast to the generally accepted view that modern science, born or at least formed in the Humanist Renaissance, met no substantial resistance, and thus simply swept magic and superstition away from world history, Paolo Rossi claims that “the Hermetic-magical tradition had an important influence on many of the leading exponents of the Scientific Revolution... Today, the Enlightenment-era positivist image of scientific knowledge marching triumphantly through the darkness and superstition of magic has definitely been laid to rest.”1 There is another aspect to the Renaissance that must be clarified – that of the role of solitary adventurers in the new fields of “science” (whether in a modern, or at least proto-modern, sense, or their own), scholarly rather than scholastic, and indebted to no tradition, only keen to share their new discoveries with their peers, often by means of correspondence and personal visits rather than communal endeavour. Although the romantic attitude of Burckhardt that viewed the Italian Renaissance as the revolt of particular individuals against the darkness of the medieval heritage has been successfully criticised, there is no question that there were important participants of the intellectual sphere (and certainly that of art) who did not belong to philosophical schools or institutions. These intellectuals were not necessarily supported by powerful patrons; rather, they were scholars who made their own way through the complex network of ideologies and traditions, following their own CEU eTD Collection 1 Paolo Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science tr. by C. De Nardi Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 26. This is the view of Steven Shapin as well, who states that "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution… Many historians are no longer satisfied that there was any singular and discrete event, localized in time and space, that can be pointed to as “the” Scientific Revolution. Such historians now reject even the notion that there was any single coherent cultural entity called “science” in the seventeenth century to undergo revolutionary change. There was, rather, a diverse array of cultural practises aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics and each experiencing different modes of change,” Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1-3. 1 presentiments while utilising – consciously or not – a great variety of sources and thoughts. The fact that they stood outside the universities and traditional institutions (even if they often had some temporary experience of them) on the one hand provided them with a freedom of choice, while on the other it also meant that the sources and ideas they made their own were not part of or rooted in the mainstream. “Scientific activity was being carried on in an unstructured ideological framework wherein everyone tried, with difficulty, to make his way, practising two or three disciplines at once, teaching one but not the other, without any spirit of specialisation in the present- day sense of the word.”2 The period this paper focuses on is the sixteenth century, the third generation of Humanists, and as such it “no longer presented the exciting aspect of continuous discovery, renewed year by year”3 by the publication of new materials and fresh approaches: the new discoveries were no longer new; the anxiety the sensational discovery of the Hermetic texts4 caused in the late fifteenth century was dying down. Their presence became usual, similarly to other discoveries, both literary and geographic; they became absorbed in that mass or complexity of traditions, cultures, attitudes that now we call Renaissance. The “new intellectuals,”5 or, as some of their contemporaries would simply call them, sorcerers, magi, or even charlatans, were thus solitary figures without the financial and social support a courtier could enjoy, and as a result they laboured under CEU eTD Collection 2 Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science 1480-1700 tr. By Brian Pearce (Bungay, Suffolk: Penguin , 1978), 22. 3 Ibid., 138. 4 On the Hermetic tradition and its impact on Renaissance culture, see, Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964) which still represents the most trustworthy authority on this subject; Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Eugenio Garin, "Nota sull'ermetismo," in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano. Ricerche e documenti (Florence: Sansoni, 1992), pages 143-154. 5 Mandrou, From Humanism to Science, 122. 2 the necessity of fighting their way up to the scholarly community unaided. In consequence they had to create extremely strong “survival strategies” to find a public, and more especially, a patron ready to support them. More often than not it was the printer who took on the task of being the intermediary between the author and the readers;6 consequently the market-forces played a very direct role in the publication, as the response to a certain work was quite explicit and graspable – and of immediate practical importance to a publisher. Thus raw business influenced the careers of all intellectuals. The “new intellectual” had to be a conscious, determined businessman who knew how to sell his literary products, and shaped himself into whatever form was the most required. “In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self- consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.”7 The matter of the ability to control one’s own identity (and, by extension or at least by persuasion, that of others) played a decisive role in the person’s further career: if one negotiated well enough among the capricious market-forces, one was able to survive, or even to acquire fame and success with all that those factors imply: wealth, recognition. Some of these “new intellectuals” went further than simply embracing the opportunities: they really believed that they were meant to do more than fulfil the requirements of the readers, but to lead some kind of a mission. They felt themselves initiated, chosen for knowing the secrets that others were not allowed or prepared or CEU eTD Collection able to know. The occult, the mysterious, the unexplainable was the borderline which divided the masses from them, the ones chosen for the mission. 6 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France tr. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), especially pages 145-182. 7 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.) 2. 3 Already in the 1960s Frances Yates drew the attention of scholars to the fact that the Florentine Neoplatonist philosophers did not focus exclusively
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